Jim Dougal, who has died of cancer aged 65, was one of the most authoritative political journalists in Northern Ireland, where he had the distinction of working for all three of the region's main broadcasters, Ulster Television, RTÉ and the BBC. He earned the respect and trust of influential figures from across the sectarian divide as a result of his affable nature and the even-handed approach he applied throughout a 40-year career.

Jim accumulated a Rolls-Royce of a contacts book that gave him a level of access that was second to none. His approach to interviews was never to hector, but to apply a mixture of charm and quiet insistence. A friend compared it to roasting a chicken. "Jim could wrap his interviewees gently in foil and have them in the oven before they even knew they were being cooked."

Though a devout Catholic, he wore his religion lightly. He maintained a long friendship, for example, with Ian Paisley, for whom he once negotiated a back-door exit from a Pittsburgh hotel so he could avoid a hostile republican demonstration out front.

Jim was born in Belfast and attended St Mary's grammar school there. His father worked for the Northern Ireland electricity board and his mother, a former nurse, was a housewife. While still at school, he began to train for the priesthood at Crossgar, County Down, a process that continued at St Gabriel's seminary in Enniskillen, where his oldest brother, Bobby, trained before his premature death. Jim decided not to continue his instruction and left to take a job with the Inland Revenue in London in 1963.

Homesickness brought him back to Belfast, where he began to write articles on rural life for the Sunday Press. From the mid-1960s, he became a freelance general reporter for the BBC and later for Ulster Television. He believed that his efforts to secure a permanent job at UTV were hindered because he was a Catholic.

Jim's big break came in 1974, when he became northern editor of the Irish broadcaster RTÉ. Through sheer professionalism, he put RTÉ, hitherto regarded with great suspicion by unionists, on the political map. Visiting the RTÉ studios became part of the established pattern for all politicians, and there they would find a man who always looked the part – dapper, with never a hair out of place. As one colleague remarked: "Jim would never enter a studio without the strong whiff of after-shave."

In 1990 Jim became the BBC's Northern Ireland political editor, his sources proving invaluable in deciphering the tortuous twists and turns of the faltering peace process. In 1994 he was the first to interview Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams and the SDLP's John Hume together after it had emerged that they had been engaging in secret talks.

Jim's efforts at magazine-programme presentation were less successful. His anchoring of the revamped Newsline lasted only two months, and in 1997, he left the BBC for the lucrative position of head of the European Commission's Belfast office. He saw a parallel between his belief that Europe was about preserving differences yet working for a common good, and the state of affairs in Northern Ireland.

His keen communication skills raised Brussels's profile and earned him promotion to the London office in 2002. No sooner had he arrived in the capital than he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. But it was stifling bureaucracy, not illness, that prompted his resignation in 2004; that and his conclusion that it was the responsibility of individual governments to sell the European idea, not the commission.

He returned to form a production company, Dougal Media, for which he made profiles of Paisley and Margaret Thatcher. His greatest passion, though, was his family. He is survived by his wife, Deirdre, daughters Tara, Emma and Tina, a stepdaughter, Nicola, and a son, James.

• James Joseph Dougal, journalist, born 19 March 1945; died 15 October 2010